As nation changed, Franklin captured its soul
When the news surfaced this week that Aretha Franklin’s earthly demise was imminent, a 1970 story about her in the Jet magazine archives started circulating online.
In the story, Franklin — who had sold millions of albums and was enjoying one of her career’s many highs — was offering to post bail for Angela Davis, then a 26-yearold former philosophy instructor and active Communist who was being held in New York City pending extradition to the Bay Area.
A Marin County jury had indicted Davis on murder, kidnapping and conspiracy charges in connection with an armed assault on the Marin County courthouse that killed four people. Like many black Americans, Franklin was having no part of the charges against Davis, who had not been present during the courthouse attack.
“I’m going to see her free if there is any justice in our courts,” Franklin said, “not because I believe in communism, but because she’s a black woman and she wants freedom for black people.”
It’s hard to understate how controversial of a stand this must have been for Franklin at the time. (Davis was tried in 1972 and found not guilty on all counts; she’s since lived a tranquil life as a scholar and activist.) And it’s the story I kept returning to again and again on Thursday, Aug. 16, after I learned that Franklin had died at the age of 76.
The story has everything, really. It’s a reminder that the flip side of the Bay Area’s hippie love was always a criminal justice system that saved its harshest punishments for black people.
It also helps me understand why Franklin, a musical ge-
nius who is still dismissed far too often as just a diva with a great voice, wasn’t just one of the best ever to sing soul music. She was soul music.
Franklin’s skills were so enormous, her gifts so prodigious that it’s difficult to imagine her as a regular person who lived in a specific time. Yet when I think about what I’ll miss about her the most, it’s the fact of her vocal presence at every moment throughout generations of black American life.
Who else’s music could work at every family reunion, church social and Saturday night party? Who else could provide the soundtrack to not just the family playlist for Sunday morning chores, but also the civil rights movement and President Barack Obama’s inauguration?
Some of Franklin’s ubiquity has to do with her versatility. She could, and did, easily sing everything from opera to blues. If a life moment that a Franklin song can’t provide the soundtrack for, I haven’t imagined it yet.
Some of it has to do with the fact that she avoided overly political songs. The latter are tough to make into hits; they also tend to date quickly.
Franklin knew her talent was built for eternity. (She didn’t sign her letters “Queen Mother of Soul” for nothing.) She also wanted hits — she was the mother of four sons and knew how hard it would be to make a living in the music business otherwise. (After observing how easily music artthere’s ists could be taken advantage of, Franklin also insisted on being paid up-front, and in cash.)
She didn’t sing specifically about politics, or about the journey that both she and the people she was singing for were undertaking over the course of those years.
Yet there’s no doubt in my mind that it was a journey undertaken together — from the Great Migration (Franklin was born in 1942 in Memphis and made her eventual home outside of Detroit) to civil rights (she was a tireless fundraiser for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.) to the election of the nation’s first black president.
As a musician, she may not have been the marcher on the front lines; that role belonged to Nina Simone. But she was the matriarch who quietly supported the struggle for justice, the one who sent checks to the NAACP while working to feed her children. And every once in a while, she made her beliefs and her commitments plain.
The story was in her actions and in every part of her music. Listen to her again, and consider her pauses, her octave-ranging leaps, her arrangements. She is underrated as both a bandleader and a piano player.
In every song, she was building bridges — between gospel and pop, the past and the present, absolute control and total ecstasy. Her guidance helped entire generations make sense of the historical and social leaps they were trying to make.
Even though she was 76, most of her contemporaries are long gone. As we return to the times she was hoping to lead us out of — times of hardship and injustice — I see it as a miracle that we had her for as long as we did. What a musician we’ve lost. What an ancestor we’ve gained.